To grow Minnesota’s future forests, an effort to collect seeds takes root

Beneath a towering red pine tree at the University of Minnesota Cloquet Forestry Center, Nick LaBonte craned back his neck and scanned the branches high above for bunches of cones hiding among the needles.

"You can see the cones that have started to open are almost kind of a bright, orangish brown color, but what you really want to see are the clusters of these cones in the purple stage," said LaBonte, a geneticist with the U.S. Forest Service.

LaBonte was not seeking the cones themselves, but rather the precious cargo they protect inside — tiny seeds that one day will grow the next generation of Minnesota's giant pines.

Meanwhile, Olivia Jascor from the University of Minnesota, Duluth used a modified pole pruner to harvest them. She sliced a smooth, purplish cone open to reveal rows of plump seeds.

And beneath a nearby old growth white pine tree, others used a kind of slingshot to shoot a rope over a branch high above, which they used to shake loose a few cones.

It was all part of a tree seed collection workshop — one of three hosted across the state earlier this month by the University of Minnesota Extension, to train about 100 people in how to find and collect tree seeds.

The sessions are part of a larger effort aimed at addressing a crucial shortfall in the state's reforestation efforts — there aren't enough seeds, nor the people to collect them, to grow the trees needed in a changing climate.

Minnesota boasts about 17 million acres of forest. But those forests are changing. They're stressed by disease, insects, drought and warming temperatures.

Seed supply is a key ingredient for land managers to be able to maintain productive forests.

"If we have the seed that is well adapted to current and future climatic conditions, which are different from what we've seen in this region in the past, then we're better positioned as a community to keep those forests healthy and resilient to those changes moving forward," said Eli Sagor, University of Minnesota Extension forestry specialist.

Need for seed

In recent years, several factors have combined to contribute to a growing surge in interest in planting more trees.

Pests including the emerald ash borer are poised to wipe out millions of trees in Minnesota. Warming temperatures have spiked interest in planting more trees in cities to provide shade and other benefits. And trees' ability to soak up huge amounts of carbon dioxide has led to growing efforts to plant more trees as a tool to help lessen the impacts of climate change.

"I think everybody's kind of on board in Minnesota that trees are good, and we want to plant more of them," said Chris Gronewold, silviculture program coordinator for the Minnesota DNR's Division of Forestry.

This past legislative session alone, state lawmakers appropriated about $17 million for trees, including grants to communities to plant more trees, and funding for the Minnesota DNR to upgrade its state tree nursery and explore reopening a second nursery.

"I think we're past the task force stage," said State Rep. Rick Hansen, DFL-South St. Paul. "It's like, 'get her done.' We have to actually be putting trees in the ground. And it takes work. And it takes that work from getting those seeds produced."

The Nature Conservancy has a goal it calls the "Minnesota Million" to reforest about a million acres of land once covered with trees.

However to reach that ambitious target, nonprofits, state and federal agencies and private landowners will need a lot more seeds to grow those trees. A seed shortage has been building for years, in part because the people that have long collected those seeds are getting older .

"And there's not necessarily the workforce coming up to replace them," explained Mary Hammes, reforestation strategy manager for The Nature Conservancy. "There's not a lot of institutional education where we're passing those skills down."

The Nature Conservancy, with the U of M and other partners, hopes to train about 350 people over the next few years to collect tree seeds. The organization plans to pay 50 of them an hourly rate to be "super collectors," who will scout prime locations and help secure permissions from landowners for other seed collectors.

Seeds for a warming climate

It's part of a broader effort backed by a $4.9 million federal USDA grant to build a "climate smart seedling production network," a supply chain to collect the seeds and grow the seedlings needed to accelerate tree planting across the state.

That network will include 40 small farmers, including Jonathan Scott, who grows red oak and yellow birch seedlings on his land north of Duluth. He attended the seed collection workshop to learn about the source of the seeds from which he grows his seedlings.

"I wanted to see the other side of the project, of collecting seed of the important tree species for our future reforestation projects," Scott said.

Participants in the workshop also traveled to a nearby 12-acre site that Carlton County manages as a seed orchard for red oaks. The county has thinned the canopy to promote the production of more acorns, which are then collected with tarps spread out on the forest floor to catch them as they fall.

"We desperately have a need for red oak seedlings in the face of climate change," said Mark Westphal, Carlton County land commissioner.

To help grow forests that will be resilient to a warming climate, tree farmers including Jonathan Scott are growing seedlings using seeds collected from as far as 200 kilometers to the south. They have genes that are a little bit better adapted to warmer temperatures. It's a process known as "assisted migration."

"We're really just doing some population expansion of native species at a small scale to ensure that there's diverse genetics to really adapt to the changing conditions that we see and will continue to see," said Hammes.

To get to that point, the state first needs to expand its network of seed collectors. And through seed collection workshops and other efforts, Hammes hopes to grow appreciation for these tiny beginnings of life in our forests.

"These seeds are the foundation to reforestation and tree planting efforts," she said. "We just need more people to see seed."